The Generation Game

by Sophie Duffy

  After his second cup of tea, Mr Jones says he must go. He is staying at the Imperial but will call back again in the morning as he wants a Word with Nina before he catches the Paddington train. (I think that Word is most probably ‘Lucas’.) Lucas begs him for one more tune on the piano but he never gets the chance; none of us have heard the front door. None of us have noticed Auntie Nina come in the dining room to find us huddled round the piano.

  ‘Lucas. Go to your room,’ she says, taking us back to the days when he had the energy to be naughty.

  ‘Yes, come along, children,’ Helena says, all Joyce Grenfell. And she wafts us out of the room, like a bad smell, closing the door behind her. They might be solid Victorian doors in this house, but we can still make out the drama unfolding in the dining room beyond.

  Auntie Nina: How did you find us?

  Mr Jones: Your parents thought I should know what’s been going on.

  Auntie Nina (repetitively): My parents? What’s been going on?

  Mr Jones (simply): Lucas.

  After that, we don’t hear anymore as we are shunted upstairs where Helena manages to get us into our pyjamas and supervise teeth-brushing. She smokes out of the bathroom window while Lucas and I sit at the top of the stairs waiting for his parents to emerge from the dining room.

  Five minutes later the door opens and Mr Jones follows the woman he used to love into the hallway. He looks up briefly and smiles at his son, a pixie in a bobble hat, and in that moment I see an expression of longing never to be forgotten.

  The next morning is Saturday. Mother goes to the shop and Lucas and I wait for Mr Jones to turn up. But he doesn’t.

  ‘He must’ve been called back urgently to work,’ says Auntie Nina.

  ‘What does he do?’ I ask to fill an awkward (and dangerously deep) gap.

  ‘He’s a dentist.’

  I imagine all those teeth in London waiting for Mr Jones’ return and am unsure why they can’t wait until the weekend is over. (I haven’t even had a wobbly tooth yet, let alone tooth ache so can’t possibly appreciate the severity of a dental emergency.)

  When it is clear that Mr Jones is not coming back, Lucas goes to his room to continue work on the Project. Auntie Nina skewers a family of snails before pruning the buddleia (poor butterflies – they will be homeless next summer). I wonder if all families are like mine. But only briefly, as I know they aren’t. I have seen the books to prove it. I’ve even read some of them, thanks to Lucas.

  Lucas stops going to school. I have to survive on my own again. There is no-one to save me a place in the dinner hall. I have no-one to save a place for on the carpet. But at least no-one calls me Fatty now. Maybe this is because Miss Pitchfork has told them to be kind to me. Or maybe they’ve noticed that I am not actually fat anymore.

  Lucas goes to hospital. I am allowed to visit him tucked away in a corner of the ward with strict instructions not to get him excited – though I don’t see how I can possibly get him excited in such a dreary place. The only difference between this and the other wards are the tiles on the walls, depicting nursery rhymes. Above Lucas’ over-sized metal bed – where Auntie Nina has tied a Torquay United scarf knitted by Bob’s neighbour – stands Dick Whittington on his way to London fully expecting to find the streets paved with gold (rather than dog mess).

  It is a bit like my first day at school. All the other children are being fussed over by their tearful mothers; I feel completely lost. While Auntie Nina talks to the doctor, I sit with Lucas. His eyes are closed but I know they are as dark as can be under those duck egg lids.

  ‘Will you finish my Project,’ he asks, his eyes still tight shut.

  ‘Yes, Lucas,’ I promise solemnly, feeling the burden of the world on my shoulders.

  He opens his eyes briefly and smiles a smile that scorches my heart. Is this what they mean by heartburn?

  ‘Thank you, Philippa,’ he says.

  I have no idea what the Project is as I have been banned from Lucas’ room ever since he embarked upon it. I only hope that I am capable of finishing it. Lucas is the cleverest boy in all the world and I am just Stupid Philippa in the Slow Readers (though at least I’m not Stupid Fat Philippa anymore).

  I don’t have much time to prepare for my task. Two days later, Auntie Nina comes home from the hospital and heads straight into the garden where she hurls an old chair at the baby gulls and then massacres the forsythia hedge that will never bloom again. Helena watches from the back door, smoking cigarette after cigarette. In the end she can stand it no more. She goes to her friend and gently prises the shears from her hand. Then she wraps her arms around her in the evening sun, trying to offer what comfort she can, knowing it is futile. Auntie Nina’s tears will never stop.

  Lucas – the boy I was going to marry, my best friend, my Thing Two – has gone. He is not mislaid, or even lost. He is as dead as Albert Morris.

  2006

  Fran is back, banging on again about you being underweight even though you were well over-cooked and should have put in an appearance last week. I was surprised myself when I caught sight of you, when I held your little damp body in my arms. I’d been sure you were going to be a nine-pounder. My skin was stretched so tight, you could’ve seen your reflection in it if you’d been on the other side. But you turned up looking like a doll. The sort of baby Amanda Denning would have. The sort of baby Helena must’ve been expecting when she got lumbered with me.

  But here I am, mother to a petit little thing.

  Fran doesn’t want you to stay petit. She is concerned about your latching on. It seems you’re a little off centre and that’s why it feels like you were born with a set of teeth already in place. She squeezes and manipulates my breasts as if they are made of Miss Pitchfork’s play dough, desperately trying to get more of them into your tiny mouth but you have lost interest, your little body twitching as you drift back towards sleep.

  “We may need to take you down to the ward after all,” Fran says.

  “I thought I was going home.”

  “It’s probably best you stay in overnight. Just so we can make sure the feeding’s up and running.”

  “Oh.”

  Fran scribbles in my stack of notes.

  “When’s the doctor coming?”

  “He’s doing the rounds as we speak,” Fran pats me sympathetically on the shoulder as she notices the tears spring to my eyes.

  “He has a right to be told,” she says.

  “The doctor?”

  “Your husband.”

  “I thought you said he was letting me down.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think of him,” she says. “It doesn’t change what’s right.”

  It is quite clear that there’s no arguing with Fran when she sets her mind to something and I’m far too tired to argue. You have to be on the ball to argue with her. She’s just like Lucas in that way.

  My Lucas.

  And then she’s gone, leaving the smell of latex gloves behind her.

  And we’re on our own.

  Chapter Five: 1971

  Shooting Stars

  It is a very hot day. Holiday-makers flood to the seafront and the beach armed with rubber rings and parasols. Mother and I, on the other hand, have something less frivolous to do.

  I was supposed to spend the afternoon at the newsagents but in the end it is decided I should be allowed to go with the grownups. Bob shuts up shop and comes along too, with his neighbour, Mrs Gracie, the one who made Lucas’ scarf. It is quite a gathering in the end, but not a nice end, a fair end.

  They say things are never black and white but on this day, as we shuffle into the cool church, they quite clearly are. The flowers in St Bartholomew’s are all white: in the porch, at the end of each pew, at the front where the vicar appears like a magician in his long dress and sombre face amid a puff of smoke. In contrast, everyone is wearing black: black suits, black skirts, black jackets. And all the ladies have black hats. Auntie Nina has a smart pill box with a veil. Mother has
a wide-brimmed hat like Audrey Hepburn in the film where she wants diamonds and sings a song on her window ledge. Mrs Gracie is weighted down by an old lady straw hat, a sprig of berries attached to the side with a lethal-looking pin. I am wearing a floppy woolly beret that makes my head itchy the way it did when I had head lice one time (another reason not to get too close to Christopher Bennett).

  I am put between Mother and Bob. Mrs Gracie sits on the end so she can stick her gammy leg out into the aisle. Auntie Nina is sitting with her mother and father in the pew in front of us, staring at the little box where her son is hidden. I keep expecting him to lift off the lid, like he is the magician’s assistant, spilling the white roses onto the flagstones in a theatrical gesture. To sit up and shout: ‘All scream for ice cream!’ But Lucas is quiet and still and dead.

  We sing a song I know from school, one of our assembly hymns called ‘Abide with me’. Bob has a good voice, clear and loud and unembarrassed, in a way his normal, everyday voice can never hope to be. Mrs Gracie sings like all old ladies – a high warble that suggests a bygone era: the War, gas masks, men in uniform on trains smoking roll-ups and the white cliffs of Dover (which are hard to imagine, ours being so red).

  The vicar coughs for our attention the way Miss Pitchfork does. Then he chants a tuneless song in a language I don’t know, but that tells of ancient times in musty monasteries on windswept hills. He asks us to please be seated and Auntie Nina slumps onto the pew between her parents. A child, their child. Her dead child. And another man’s child, not just her own: Mr Jones, who has left his own parents behind in London, while he mourns alone, to one side, his fingers still, dead moths in his lap.

  Lucas would have liked it here. His family. His friends. It isn’t fair. He is hidden away in a place from which he’ll never be able to escape. Maybe he can hear us from there, singing ‘Abide with me’. He liked that song. He had the voice of a choirboy and got countless house points for piping up when no-one else knew the words (it helps when you can read).

  Maybe he is knocking on the door of his box with his pale little hand, only no-one can hear him because we are too busy singing.

  Or maybe he isn’t really in there at all. Maybe he’s fooled everyone and just run away. Maybe he’ll slip in quietly at the back and listen to the words of the vicar, the musty chants, the warbles and the tears.

  Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll never see him again as long or as short as I live.

  My Lucas.

  My huckleberry friend.

  That night I lie awake in bed. It has been an eventful day to say the least. Not only have I lost Lucas forever but I have also lost my first tooth. I’ve had plenty of time lately for wobbling and it has only been a matter of days from the first looseness to the final extraction and I’ve accomplished this milestone all on my own, with no fuss. I don’t bother telling Helena as she has her mind on other things, mainly comforting Auntie Nina and keeping us fed and watered (lots of hard-boiled eggs and ham salads. I am wasting away and no-one has noticed). I examine the little yellow tooth (too many sweets on tap, what would Mr Jones think?) before wrapping it up in a tissue and sliding it under my pillow. Then I wait for the tooth fairy.

  No-one has remembered to draw my curtains. I can watch the moon which is small and round and might bounce away like a ping-pong ball if the residents of Torquay all breathed out at the same time. I wonder if Lucas is up there somewhere, a speck of stardust that Auntie Sheila would hoover up if she were an angel on cleaning duty. I decide not to get out of bed and close my curtains, in case he is watching me, lonely up there without Auntie Nina or Mr Jones.

  Sleep comes eventually and shakes itself over me, pouring dreams into my ear. There is the smell of Palmolive. A splash of water. A whisper that mentions a father and a son and (scarily) a holey ghost. Then suddenly it is morning and, after hunting high and low, it is apparent that the tooth fairy hasn’t put in an appearance. Later that day I find out why: Helena has scared her off. I know it was Helena because I overhear her telling Bob when he calls round with a box of Milk Tray. I am sitting at the top of the stairs (I’ve spent a lot of time there lately) and eavesdrop on their conversation in the kitchen below.

  ‘Are you all right, Helena?’

  ‘Well, no, actually, seeing as you’ve asked. I think I’m slowly going mad. In some horrible way I feel jealous of Nina.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bob asks, flabbergasted.

  ‘I know it sounds horrid but nothing can ever happen to her again that will make her feel like this. The worst is over.’

  Bob doesn’t say anything but I hear his heavy sigh.

  Then Helena goes on: ‘You’ll never guess what I did last night.’

  And no, Bob can’t guess, so Helena tells him.

  ‘I baptised Philippa. I crept in her room in the middle of the night and I sprinkled water on her forehead and said those magic words.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Bob. ‘Well, that makes sense, I suppose. You could always do it properly, you know, in church.’

  ‘It’s done now,’ states Helena before excusing herself, saying she must shop for more eggs and ham.

  I watch her show Bob out. When he’s gone, she stops in front of the hall mirror and sighs at her reflection. ‘Yes, I know. I’m old before my time,’ she agrees with the woman she sees there. Then she looks up, feeling me watching her, and I can see that the woman in the mirror is lying to Helena; she is so young, barely a woman. She smiles and I see my own face reflected in hers and I know she doesn’t want me to die. But in case I do, she wants protection. She wants to know I won’t become a speck of stardust destined to be sucked up by a cosmic vacuum cleaner.

  She is a good mother. She loves me.

  But she is wrong about Auntie Nina. Surely the worst is only just beginning.

  Auntie Nina has gone. The Movers have been in and packed up all of her things in tea chests and carried them away in a big lorry, back to London. She always planned to go home eventually but she never expected it to be on her own.

  Poor Auntie Nina.

  And poor us. Mother and I must move out too as the house is being sold. I wish we could buy it so that we could stay on. So that I could pretend Lucas was still pit-pattering overhead in his room. Unfortunately there is no chance of that. Mother might be able to find the money for shoes and lipstick and handbags but not for a house.

  We pack our own things in cardboard boxes with the help of Mrs Gracie who is becoming as much a part of everyday life now as Lucas used to be, though in a completely different way.

  ‘Call me Wink,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s my name,’ she says, rolling one of Mother’s few ornaments up in newspaper.

  I can’t think what mother would call her child ‘Wink’. Then again, I can’t imagine Wink ever having a mother because she looks like she’s always been an old lady. Wink seems to know what I am thinking.

  ‘I’m only sixty-two,’ she says. As if this were young. (Six is young, I know that for sure.)

  ‘People think I’m much older,’ she goes on, placing the ornament in an orange box from the International. ‘Because of my ruddy Multiple Wotsit.’

  Multiple Wotsit is a disease Wink has, a disease which takes it out of her, makes it harder for her to get about and do all the things she used to do like gardening and shopping and the hokey-cokey. I hope the disease is not lethal like Lucas’.

  On the final afternoon, as the sun is heating up the house so it feels like I am going to bake like one of Auntie Sheila’s Victoria Sandwiches, I kneel on the bare boards of the dining room amongst the dust and forgotten marbles and hairgrips, staring at the place where Mr Jones’ fingers travelled up and down the piano keys. I remember Lucas watching him. I remember my promise. Or rather, Mother reminds me.

  ‘This is yours,’ she says. ‘Auntie Nina left it for you… Well, Lucas did.’ And she has to take out her hanky and give her nose a good blow, before handing over a Quality Street tin.

 
She lights a cigarette as I take off the lid to reveal, not chocolates, but the contents of the Secret Project. It isn’t quite what I imagined. I pictured all sorts of things in the weeks leading up to Lucas’ death and then I forgot all about it. Now here it is in my hands. Here I am, taking off the lid…

  Inside, Lucas has lined the tin with familiar flowery material.

  ‘That’s where my Laura Ashley blouse got to,’ Mother says. She is almost cross, for a second, but she soon smiles a sad smile and then inhales deeply on her Consulate.

  I slowly pull back the cloth like I am detonating a bomb. And it is a bomb of some sort. A time bomb ready to go off at some unknown point in the distant future, one we can only guess at. I realise what it is even before I read Lucas’ instructions. It is a time capsule, like the one that John Noakes and Peter Purvis and Valerie Singleton buried on Blue Peter. Of course, I should have realised that’s what Lucas was up to. He was fascinated when we watched it together and saw them pack up a Blue Peter annual, some photographs and a set of decimal coins (whose introduction has been tricky for Bob and his sweets, but trickier still for old ladies like Wink who still hark back to rationing coupons).

  I open the instructions which are sealed inside a brown envelope with my name in bubble writing on the front. This is what the letter says:

  Dear Philippa,

  Sorry I had to go and leave you. I wanted us to have more days together in the Bone Yard. But do not forget to visit me there. (Maybe I will be near Albert Morris.) Tell me about Miss Pitchfork and Bob. Tell me what you are reading. Tell me what happens in Doctor Who. Tell me anything you want. Even when you become a grown-up. Please keep on telling me. And please find somewhere good to bury the Time Capsule. Then come back and open it when you have children of your own. Bring them with you and tell them about me.

  Your (best) friend,

  Lucas. xxx

  For the first time in weeks I feel happy. Tear drops are falling onto the paper but they are happy ones. Lucas is still my best friend even though I can’t see him or touch him or breathe in his currant bun smell.